Many formed transcontinental friendships, even though they may have never met personally. They would use the telegraph lines to spread jokes "virally", with "ha" being their version of today's "LOL". Similarly, "min pen" was apparently the 1890 equivalent of today's IM text "afk brb".

Thursday, July 28, 2011

In 1987, 42% of the software developers in America were women. And 34% of the systems analysts in America were women. Women had started to flock to computer science in the mid-1960s, during the early days of computing, when men were already dominating other technical professions but had yet to dominate the world of computing. For about two decades, the percentages of women who earned Computer Science degrees rose steadily, peaking at 37% in 1984.

In fact, for a hot second back in the mid-sixties, computer programming was actually portrayed as women’s work by the mass media.

The images from the 1967 Cosmo magazine are hilarious. Don't worry, ladies. According to Grace Hopper, programming is just like "planning a dinner."

Thursday, July 21, 2011

ALPRs are not ordinary cameras. Attached to police cruisers, or fixed on telephone poles or other stationary places, the cameras snap an image of nearly every license plate they encounter. The device produces a file for each image captured, which includes searchable text displaying the time, date and GPS location of the car when and where the plate was 'read'. This information is fed into a database, where it can be shared with other agencies and databases, and "mined" or analyzed.

One of the major problems with ALPR technology is that it sucks up all license plates, not simply those associated with people suspected of wrongdoing. Therefore as the technology expands, it is possible that law enforcement will be able to track your movements with incredible precision as you go about your daily life in your car. Without proper privacy protections backed by the force of law, ALPRs become yet another tracking technology...

A first-aid kit found on a 2,000-year-old shipwreck has provided a remarkable insight into the medicines concocted by ancient physicians to cure sailors of dysentery and other ailments...

"It's a spectacular find. They were very well sealed," Dr Alain Touwaide, from the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in Washington DC, told The Sunday Telegraph. "The plants and vegetables were probably crushed with a mortar and pestle – we could still see the fibres in the tablets. They also contained clay, which even today is used to treat gastrointestinal problems."

The pills are the oldest known archaeological remains of ancient pharmaceuticals...

For the past few decades, scientists have been playing more and more with the "slowing down" of light, and scientists at the University of Glasgow have achieved a breakthrough in this area. They've managed to slow the speed of light to a relative crawl -- 741 miles per hour, or about the speed of sound.

Thursday, July 07, 2011

The next step after "invisibility cloaks" are "event cloaks" that don't just hide objects, but events:

Using the ultimate bank heist as an example, McCall and Kinsler explain how a thief could, in principle, use an "event cloak" to steal money from a safe, without even the CCTV surveillance cameras being aware.

The burglar would somehow need to split all the light approaching the safe into two parts: "before" and "after", with the "before" part sped up and the "after" part slowed down.

This would create a brief period of darkness during which the burglar could enter the scene and steal the money, being careful to close the safe door before they leave.

With the safe-cracker gone, the process of speeding up and slowing down the light would then be reversed, leading to an apparently untouched scene once again.

Robbing a bank is, of course, only an example to illustrate the principle of what an event cloak could do. As McCall and Kinsler explain, a more likely application of a full-size event cloak would be to control the flow of signals in an optical routing system, where one may need to process simultaneous uninterrupted signals at the same time.

Wednesday, July 06, 2011

Orb-weaver spiders create asymmetrical 3D webs on Earth, but in previous experiments on the space station, their webs were much more symmetrical. As you can see in the time-lapse above, Esmeralda is following this trend with her circular web. But now Countryman is also noticing that on the ISS, the spiders aren't at the top of their web facing downwards to look out for captured prey. "They've been sitting in all different parts of their web and they're not necessarily facing down in relation to their habitat," she says.

On the ground, a spider simply has to let itself drop and gravity will help the long strands of the web fall into place. But when a spider tries this in space it goes nowhere...

Friday, July 01, 2011

"Invisibility cloaks" have been in the news since 2006, when scientists proposed that they could design synthetic materials that would bend light in ways that made the objects under them appear invisible. Three years ago, Steve Cummer at Duke University figured out that the same principle could be applied to sound waves, and his lab has now brought out their first physical proof of the idea.